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THE HISTORY OF THE HOUSTON SÄNGERBUND BY THEODORE G. GISH A PUBLICATION OF THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAS-GERMAN STUDIES THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON, 1990 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.............................................................................! INTRODUCTION GERMAN SONG IN TEXAS...........................................................v THE HISTORY OF THE HOUSTON SÄNGERBUND..............................1 I. THE BEGINNINGS...................................................................1 II. TURN OF THE CENTURY .....................................................2 III. BETWEEN THE WARS.........................................................8 IV. THE SECOND WORLD WAR...............................................2 1 V. THE POSTWAR YEARS.........................................................2 4 VI. THE DECADE OF THE EIGHTIES......................................2 8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS While I am not a member of the Houston Sängerbund, I have enjoyed a relationship, both personal and professional, with the organization for nearly a quarter of a century. Kae Velmeden first introduced me to the Sängerbund when she was a student at the University of Houston in the early '60s. For many of the intervening years, Kae and Heinz Velmeden were instrumental in guiding my association with the club. For a "non-singer," the performances of the Sängerbund at a Sängertag have always been a particularly moving experience for me. I first actually heard the club, not in Houston itself, but in San Antonio in the '70s. Another memorable performance was at a rainy Sängertag in Houston in the old Liederkranz building a few years later. The Sängertag in Houston in 1983, on the occasion of the club's 100th anniversary and the tricentennial anniversary of the first German colony in the New World at Germantown, Pennsylvania, was also a special event. Finally, the Sängerbund gave me a particular sense of joy and pride when it sang the song Willkommen from Texas Fahrten (the musical which I had uncovered in New Braunfels) at the Houston meeting of the German-Texan Heritage Society in 1986. Especially during the last decade, my participation with the club has included several projects of the Sängerbund's German Cultural Committee, the hosting of the meeting in 1983 of the historical organization, the Houston Salon, and the 100th anniversary commemoration of Washington Cemetery in 1987. My relationship with the Sängerbund has deepened during the last few years, because of my friendship with Rodney Koenig and Asta Grona, two relatively new members of the club. Both Rodney and Asta were students in a course on the "Texas Germans" which I taught at the Goethe Institute, and both have been instrumental in the writing of this history. In my nearly a quarter of a century relationship with the Sängerbund, periods of time have elapsed when I did not visit the club. Still, when I returned, Sängerbund members have always treated me like a friend, and I have always felt like one. The Sängerbund has contributed financially to this project over the last few years. In 1988, after Asta Grona became seriously ill and was placed in a convalescent home in Fredericksburg, her family has twice made generous financial gifts in her name to the Institute of Texas-German Studies at the University of Houston. Because of her relationship with the Sängerbund and also our friendship, it seemed fitting to use part of this financial support to underwrite the publication of this history. In this sense, this volume is dedicated to the past and present members of the Houston Sängerbund, but especially to Asta. While Asta certainly brought her own special uniqueness to her association with the Sängerbund, she possesses much of the typical ethnic background of the membership. Asta was born in 1906 in San Antonio, as one of four daughters of Felix Grona and Dina Ernst Grona. Because of her father's health, the family moved to Fredericksburg, where there were a number of other Grona relatives, when Asta was seven. After a few years, however, the family returned to San Antonio. In San Antonio, the father continued his work as a mattress maker, while Asta's mother developed a floral and nursery business. After graduating from Herff High School in San Antonio, Asta attended the University of Texas, where she obtained a degree in home economics, and a teaching certificate. Asta then taught home economics for several years in Hochheim, Belton, Quero, and San Antonio. In 1937, Asta made a permanant move to Houston, where she was active in various businesses, including work at the Houston Ship Channel and with the Hogg family interests, as an artist in a lithography business and as an interior decorator. Asta considers that she had a very "German" upbringing. Both her father and mother were associated with the Sons of Hermann in San Antonio and her father subscribed to the Fredericksburger Wochenblatt. The family spoke German well into the time that Asta was at the University of Texas. She remembers, in fact, always wanting to speak German when she returned home from college. Asta also fondly remembers the German customs at Christmas and Easter, the Christmas cookies and the making of Kümmeleier at Easter. Asta also attended German summer school when she was little. The summer school had German spelling bees, and Asta even remembers that she once spelled Vogel incorrectly with an f instead of a v! Although Asta joined the Houston Sängerbund relatively late in her life, her enthusiasm for the organization and the joy with which she sang as an alto in the Damenchor was unbounded. She also exhibited the same amount of enthusiasm for her other German-American interests. She was a very active member of the German-Texan Heritage Society. The other members of the "Texas German" class can likewise fondly remember Asta's enthusiasm for the course, the contributons she made about her own personal family heritage, and the refreshments that, unbidden, she brought to the class! Other members of the Sängerbund have contributed to this history in various ways. During the last five years, the Officers and Directors have been very supportive, particularly when the project seemed, at one point, to be stalled. Over the years, I have received historical "tidbits" informally from numerous members of the club. While this information may not have found its way directly into this history, it has certainly provided me a background sense for the writing of the history. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to the countless authors of the existing written documents of the Sängerbund from 1905-85 to which I have had access. Two members of the Sängerbund have been particularly helpful with this project. Edward Kasparik solicited the cooperation of several long-time members who provided indespensible oral histories about the Sängerbund. Edward himself, needless to say, gave his own personal recollections and the others are listed in the history itself. Edward also painstakingly read the final draft of the history. I could not have asked for a better editor! As a friend, Rodney Koenig has supported this project, as my other Texas-German activities, with both kindness and enthusiasm. Rodney has been especially helpful in providing me the access to the Sängerbund's archival material. He has also coordinated the collection of data for the Appendix of the history. Rodney too read draft sections of the history. The University of Houston, finally, assisted this project in several ways. Ute Ritzenhofen, from the University of Mainz and the University of Houston's first graduate fellow in Texas-German Studies, conducted and then transcribed a number of the oral histories. Although this task was quite a challenge for a young German in the early months of her first visit to the United States, Ute performed the job admirably. The University of Houston has also made available the necessary technical assistance for the history's publication. Dr. Barry Brown, Director of the University's Foreign Language Laboratory, provided the expertise and the facilities for the camera-ready page production, while the history was printed at the University's Printing Plant. In conclusion, I would like to dedicate this volume to one other individual, my father-in-law (now deceased), Raymond Rudloff. Ray grew up as a St. Louis German-American, in the same generation as Asta. I especially enjoyed watching the rekindling of Ray's own ethnic heritage as he visited the Sängerbund with me on numerous occasions. There were many other such moments of mutual ethnic rediscovery for Ray and myself. The most memorable, however, occured in Germany several years ago. While my in-laws and my wife and I were driving along the Rhine, we stopped on the road across from the "Lorelei" cliffs. Without any hestitation, and without ever having done anything like this before, Ray and I spontaneously burst forth with the immortal song by Heine! The Lorelei, I should add, is the also the first German song I ever heard. For even though my mother is not German, she learned the song in high school and she would sing it to me when I was a young child. Consequently, this spontaneous singing in Germany - with the memory of my mother's singing - remains one of the peak moments of my own ethnic awareness, and a personal testimony to the communal power of das deutsche Lied. Theodore G. Gish Houston, Texas Winter, 1989 INTRODUCTION: GERMAN SONG IN TEXAS The many thousands of German immigrants who helped significantly to settle Texas in its formative years around the middle of the 19th century and then again in the decades after the Civil War, brought with them a cultural heritage unique in its variety and richness. The record of German "material" culture in Texas, epecially much of the stone masonry of public buildings in cities such as Austin and San Antonio or the pioneer Fachwerk architecture throughout the German regions of the state, is, quite literarally, still a visible reminder of this heritage. Less directly accessible, but no less important, is the intellectual and spiritual impact which Texas Germans had upon the cultural, the religious, the educational, and the political development of the state.

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